A Problem Without a Name, but One With a Lengthy Background

Guest post by Patrick Potyondy, 

Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University

          In 1949, Millicent McIntosh—soon to be president of Bernard College—argued that “a well-adjusted individual who has majored in Greek archaeology, in my opinion, is much better prepared for marriage and motherhood than the ill-adjusted girl who has spent her time in special courses and doing special reading.” Almost in response, Margaret Mead was quoted in 1960 as saying, “The paradox of women who are educated like men and can do most of the things men do, but are still taught to prefer marriage to any other way of life, causes most of the confusion that exists for women today.” And then, in 1963, Betty Friedan published what would become her nationally famous The Feminine Mystique, representing the cultural malaise of white women across the United States. While it remains an important touchstone in the teaching of US history, Friedan’s work—like so many others—was a culmination of thought and action which preceded hers.

            Historian Paula Fass, in Outside In argues that the very paradoxes found in the quotes above led to the women’s revolution epitomized by Friedan’s work. By the 1920s, women made up almost half of all college students. With so many women in higher education, why then, by the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, had more not become doctors, lawyers, CEOs? Fass calls this the “female paradox”—that they “were receiving more education than they seemed to need.” It would have driven economists nuts (it probably did).

            The peace of World War II, like the peace of previous wars, brought ironic changes in the status of people. By 1950, women made up only 30 percent of higher education’s student rolls (the lowest point in the entire twentieth century). Amidst shifting social roles, many female students clamored for not only a better education but a better future to match. A few women, like McIntosh above, were conflicted about just exactly what they wanted—classical archaeology but not a future in it? One woman admitted, “I’d trade History of Civilization for a practical cooking and nutrition course.”

            Some educators had different plans, planning to provide these women with an education they thought more suited to the life-goals of 1950s American white women—that is, a picket-fence, kids, and a husband. Claiming the mantle of Progressivism in education, this cadre of reformers believed that “young people gladly study about things which have meaning for them.” So, Vassar—that school now thought of as the bastion of feminism—had begun to offer courses in “euthenics” in the 1920s. Euthenics, or race development, emphasized women’s roles in reproduction, child rearing, and family affairs. By the 1950s, such themes permeated most colleges that offered courses directed at women. Vassar’s catalogue read: “certain courses are organized around the needs of the individual student. They help her to uncover what she is, and to say it honestly, and effectively, in whatever way she is best able to.” It seemed to these educators that they were on the right track. After the war, the baby boom was in full swing, and women were having babies earlier and more often than at any point in the twentieth century (for that’s how the period thought of it—women had babies, not couples). Of course then, they might have thought, women need and want this brand of instruction.

            A majority of educators, however, still thought the liberal arts should play a central role. This group was supported by the millions of women who continued working, even while married, after WWII. While some women were displaced as men returned home, women’s participation in paid employment rose continuously after 1945—and half of them were married. You can see how this might create conflict with the educators above—would “practical cooking and nutrition” knowledge serve these women well in the modern office? Following a more liberal course of study—mixing psychology and sociology along with courses in “Family Life Studies”—many women were moving toward a more expansive sense of economic and social citizenship. Some of them would make families, some of them would make careers, and many of them would do both.           

            Fass shows that, by 1963 in any case, neither side of the educational spectrum won out entirely. Colleges offered a diverse array of courses for a diverse array of reasons. The significance, though, was that these debates over what sort of education women should get while in higher education “helped to create the basis for a massive renewal of feminist aspirations.”

            And here, we see the cultural and historical significance of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. Far from a book out of blue, it was a text of and for its time (after all, she surveyed college women for the basis of her study). Her book was something for like-minded white women to rally around and declare that it was high time to address “the problem that has no name.”

Visualizing the Problem That Has No Name - Blonde Ennui

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, image from flickr

            Travis has already done an exceptional job considering the broad intellectual debts of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and so I want to take my post here in a somewhat different direction – tracking “the problem that has no name” through several pop cultural creations and considering their resonances, traces, and the palimpsest they create.  When I teach a course on Women in Film, I always teach one of my all time favorite films Bonnie and Clyde (1967).  One of my arguments about Arthur Penn’s fictionalized account of the (in)famous bandits is that – as with so many historical dramas – the Depression era piece is really about the sociopolitical climate of the 1960s when it was made.  Bonnie and Clyde positions Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as attractive outlaws that take on the establishment and build an alternative family that lives both outside of the legal system and at a remove from more ordered society.  Bonnie’s decision to go on the run with Clyde is clearly motivated by her desire to escape the confines of her gendered existence in her small town – the film establishes this in the classic opening shot of naked in her bedroom; she lays on her bed and peers through the bars of the bed frame, emphasizing the feeling of entrapment.  When she spies Clyde attempting to steal her mother’s car, the entire conversation is shot from outside the house so that she is framed by the window and presented as confined to this sphere.  Clyde convinces her to abandon her life in this small town for the excitement of robbing banks, but, following the increasing visibility of female sexual pleasure allowed in the 1960s, Bonnie has the greater sexual passion and is thwarted in her desires by Clyde’s impotency.  Violence comes to stand in for sexual intimacy.  When I teach Bonnie and Clyde, I ask my students to compare the opening scene to Friedan’s concept of “the problem that has no name” as we watch Dunaway’s skillful performance of a feeling of uneasiness and lack of satisfaction with her physical and economic confinement.  Freidan is not writing about poor white women, but the emotional weight is similar. 

To further illustrate symbol deconstructed in The Feminine Mystique, I show my students the music video for the song “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)” by Eurythmics (above).  The 1987 video opens with lead singer Annie Lennox dressed as a dowdy 1950s housewife with mousy brown hair.  She sits knitting and tells the viewer: “Some women think that they don’t count.  You have used that weapon against me.  Did I tell you that I was lying by the way, when I said that I wanted a new mink coat?  I was just thinking about something sleek to wrap around my tender throat.  I was dreaming like a Texan girl, a girl who thinks she’s got the right to everything, a girl who thinks that she should have something . . . extreme.”  The monologue – directed towards the patriarchal figure of the husband – speaks directly to Friedan’s argument.  Writing about The Feminine Mystique in her book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed says, “The happy housewife is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labor under the sign of happiness.  The claim that women are happy and that this happiness is behind the work they do functions to justify gendered forms of labor, not as a product of nature, law, or duty, but as an expression of a collective wish and desire” (50).  Lennox’s unnerving opening speech suggests that domestic labor is belittled by the patriarchal system and that status symbols – the mink coat – are empty gestures that hide the homicidal rage of the housewife.  As Ahmed illustrates, happiness is expected to paper over the systems in place that create the gendered division of labor.  “Beethoven (I Love to Listen To)” shows Lennox’s character cleaning the house in fits of manic energy, surveyed not by a visible male figure but by the judgment of the camera, the ticking of the clock and the self doubt found in the mirror’s reflection.  A small blonde girl – presumably the fantasmic projection of the housewife – wreaks havoc on the order Lennox attempts to create and as the song picks up momentum the housework becomes increasingly disturbing and the viewer expects a violent climax – especially as Lennox attacks various vegetables with knives and skewers.  Instead of ending in physical violence, the video builds to a scene of the housewife at her bureau pulling off her brown hair – a wig – and replacing it with a big mess of Marilyn Monroe-style blonde curls.  As she does this, the mirror flashes between Lennox’s now garish face, the face of a man in heavy makeup as in preparation for a drag performance, and the mischievous little girl. Both in her solo work and as part of Eurythmics, Lennox’s music video personae have always suggested the performative nature of gender – she is always camping on gender and showing herself as a female female impersonator (yes, that’s supposed to be repeated).  In “Beethoven,” her roles – as dowdy housewife and than sexually free vixen – are both revealed as equally performed.  The happy housewife is a fantasy undergirded not just by ideas about gender and home, but also by ideas about sexual repression and expression.  

Christina Aguilera's homage to Annie Lennox

Christina Aguilera’s 2010 music video for the song “Not Myself Tonight” pays tribute to this video with a scene of Aguilera dressed in a skintight dress with a large blonde wig – the same outfit that Lennox wears as she escapes the confines of her home in “Beethoven.”  In the newer video, Aguilera goes a step further setting fire to all the clothes in her closet, further emphasizing the ways in which gender can be put on and taken off.  The triumphant final scene of “Beethoven” shows Lennox strutting down the street outside what appears to be a prison complex – the home becomes a prison that confines through economic and social control, and the lie of happiness as overriding personal desire. 

Of course, the “you go girl!” feeling that we are to feel at the closing of the Eurythmics’ video requires us to ignore the class and race politics embedded in the fantasy of the housewife.  Ahmed notes that, “Even as fantasy . . . [the housewife] evokes the embodied situation of some women more than others.  After all, many women at this time were not housewives: for some women to work at home would be an aspiration rather than situation” (50).  Drawing on black feminist cultural critic bell hooks, Ahmed writes that the liberation of housewives as a solution to their unhappiness absents the issue of who will be caring for the children and home if/when white women of the 1950s and 1960s enter the workforce.  Friedan’s idea of liberation from the home “might also conceal the labor of other women” (Ahmed 51), meaning that lower class women, often women of color, would fill these domestic tasks as they had long before the creation of the post-World War II nuclear family dream.  

In her 1970 essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” Frances Beale writes, “[It] is idle dreaming to think of Black women simply caring for their homes and children like the middle-class white model,” arguing that the “parasitic existence” enjoyed by white middle class women was a “phony” luxury never afforded by women of color (91).  Beale sees Friedan’s housewife as living in “legalized prostitution” with her subjectivity reduced to “only a biological function,” but says that for Black women “the reality of the degrading and dehumanizing jobs that were relegated to us quickly dissipated this mirage of womanhood” (91).  The Feminine Mystique suffers from the way it was taken up as being about all “women” by a mainstream (read: white, middle class, college educated, “pretty”) feminist movement of the 1960s that often failed to consider that deconstructing “the mirage of womanhood” necessitated inspecting their own privileges that intersected with their gendered existence.  The happy housewife however remains a standard trope that flits across magazines, television ads, and various other media, in an ongoing discourse.  Ahmed writes that, “The happy housewife retains its force as a place holder for women’s desires” (52), but in order to unpack its worth we need to be cognizant of the multiple subject positions held by this figure – it’s not accidental that Faye Dunaway, Annie Lennox and Christina Aguilera are all pale blondes.  bell hooks argues that not only do blondes "have more fun" but that they are more likely to succeed due to "white supremacy and racism" (158).  Frances Beale's message to the white women’s liberation movement remains important today: “If the white groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have common bonds.  If they do not realize that the reasons for their condition lie in the system . . . then we cannot unite with them around common grievances or even discuss these issues in a serious manner because they’re completely irrelevant to the Black struggle” (99). 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Beale, Frances. "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female." The Black Woman: An Anthology. Ed. Toni Cade. New York: Mentor, 1970. 90-100. Print.

hooks, bell. "Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. 157-164. Print.

The Problem that Has No Name (Part 2) - Whose Table Is It Anyway?

     Reflections on and responses to the publication and legacy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique continue this week.  The Diane Rehm show hosted a wonderful roundtable on Wednesday (click here for the audio), and one of the participants of that discussion, Michele Bernard, has posted a thoughtful response at the blog for The Washington Post.  J. Brendan Shaw will be sharing some of his thoughts and work with us in the coming days, and I think Patrick Potyondy will be chiming in later as well.  As I suggested in my previous post, my thoughts on Friedan's work and legacy are complicated by both an uncertainty of how Betty Friedan fits in with current discussions about the relations between sexuality, the body, power, and community and a sense that Friedan's work is difficult to understand and appreciate without having some clear grasp on the history of those relations.  Michele Bernard's introduction to her Washington Post blog post is breathtaking in regard to this second complication:

                       Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" turned 50 this week.  At the time of its publication, 

                       "Singletons" (circa 1963 defined as an unmarried woman) did not have a legal right to birth

                       control.  Married women did not have equal access to credit.  In some stages, married women

                       could not get a job without the permission of their husbands.  Occupation segregation was the 

                       norm. The wage gap was more like a wage canyon. Sexual harassment of women in the 

                       workplace was not yet legally actionable. Abortion was illegal. Every state in the nation 

                       required "fault-based" grounds for divorce. Spousal rape was not a crime in most states."

As one of the respondents on the "Diane Rehm Show" put it with respect to the order of things in 1963, "It might as well have been 1396" (and the medievalist in me boils over at the implications).  But the respondent is right to suggest a radical alterity between the gendered America in which we live now and the one out of which Friedan's book emerged.*  Part of what has been nice about calling The Feminine Mystique to mind this week has been coupling the sense of how far we have come with reminders of how much is left to be done, how easy it is to lose rights, power, equality, access, or freedoms, and how the movement to guarantee those things for one person or group might (intentionally or inadvertently) exclude others.  In other words, the work of commemoration this week has also emphasized the important work of collective memory and - at really fascinating moments - the more important work of disrupting that collective memory.

In her 2010 piece for The Scholar and Feminist Online, Sara Ahmed begins with an object familiar to readers of her Queer Phenomenology:  it's a table.  Gathered around this table is a family (Ahmed's family, a feminist's family, a killjoy's family, maybe simply a different iteration of your family?).  The conversation, which starts so politely and is perhaps intended to be polite, moves to a topic you/she/I find problematic.  You/she/I become tense, the room becomes tense, and maybe - just maybe - you/she/I decide to speak out.  Ahmed finishes the scene with an all-too-familiar ending:  

         You respond, carefully, perhaps. You say why you think what they have said is problematic. 

          You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel "wound up," recognising with 

          frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. In speaking up 

          or speaking out, you upset the situation. That you have described what was said by another 

          as a problem means you have created a problem. You become the problem you create.

It is a feeling of alienation that Ahmed describes, and she does well to describe a series of these alienations throughout her article.  They range from the quite intimate (and perhaps readily recognizable) alienations at this table to a broader alienation one might feel from certain political/social communities - the feminist table - because, as Ahmed points out, "If we are unseated by the family table, it does not necessarily follow that we are seated together."  

Rather, Ahmed, Bernard, and the respondents on Diane Rehm's program demonstrate the perpetual truth of Donna Haraway's claim that "It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective - or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun."**  J. Jack Halberstam's Gaga Feminism, for example, often uses the label phemininism/pheminist in order to dismantle the notion of "woman" or "the feminine" (at least that is how I understood her use of the ph grapheme).***  And the hashtag #sorryfeminists might demonstrate more pointedly just how drastically different the uses of and attachments to feminism have become (see this excellent treatment at Feminist Philosophers). There is simultaneously a stigma, a misunderstanding, and an ironization of what contemporary feminists look like and stand for, and one of the effects this week has been that these views of feminism have come to mainstream media (except I still have not found a Fox Media outlet addressing the anniversary of Friedan's book; please let me know if anyone finds something!).   

Though it is a radio program in which some of the participants are clearly available through phone, I liked imagining Diane Rehm's Wednesday program as a public round table on feminism.  It worked well with my recollections of Ahmed's call for killjoys, for claiming a seat at the table, and for willfulness as a politically efficacious act.  In a show that begins with the question "How far have we come since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963?" I was thrilled to hear so many qualifications to our sense of progress in gender equality, to hear how limited the reach of Friedan's book was (even if NOW made other inroads or if the book prompted reactionary movements that galvanized black women, lesbians, or immigrant communities), and to hear other qualifications and challenges to a narrative that could otherwise end happily ever after. It was wonderful to hear respondents balk at the appellation of "feminist," discuss the intersections of women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, and conceptions of masculinity, address the need to recognize history as a political necessity, and suggest that there is still much left to be done, that there are real political/social changes that can be made, and that there is still room at the table.

*Of course, I write this with measured optimism and my rose-colored glasses pressed firmly to my face.     

**Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Edited by Donna Haraway (Routledge: NY, 1991): 155.

***While I am hesitant to suggest too straight of a line between Friedan and Halberstam, I think there is a clear relation between their respective projects (the dismantling of social, legal, moral constructs that have served - and continue to serve - to perpetuate inequalities and injustices).

The Problem that Has No Name (Part 1)

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, I have asked a number of friends to join me at The Birds’ Nest to reflect on the legacy of Friedan’s work.  In order to get the conversation started, I thought I would offer an account of my introduction to Second Wave Feminism and Betty Friedan and talk about how some weird gatherings of interests have lately prompted me to return to feminist/gender/queer theory.

Original image is from Liza Donnelly's Forbes article
celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique .

            My initial reading of The Feminine Mystique was through a series of excerpts in Anne Valk’s History 500A during my first year of graduate study at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.  The course was a graduate seminar focusing on post-war American social and political history, and the Friedan excerpts were coupled with Daniel Horowitz’s Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism.  I can vaguely recall that our conversation centered around the terminus a quo of Friedan’s enunciation of this “problem that has no name” and its relation to other movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s that were arguing for equality, changes in the status quo, and revisions to “the American Dream.”  What I failed to see at the time – and why I might benefit from a reread of Horowitz if I had not discarded my copy long ago – is the way in which these two texts in Professor Valk’s seminar were setting the ground work for seeing the connections among the various Leftist political movements of the 1960’s (NOW, SNCC, SDS) as well as the possible linkages between the activism of the 60s and that of the 70s on both the right and the left.

            It has been interesting to follow the articles celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique.  Some have seized the moment to recall how different the world was fifty years ago (NYTimes), others are quick to point out how much work remains (Huffington Post Blog), and still others have suggested that Friedan’s ideas have been betrayed (National Review).  My thoughts on Friedan are necessarily different.  Through some historical imagination, I can begin to glimpse the world that Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique, but living in a world that is unquestionably (and I think monumentally) shaped by Friedan’s work, it is difficult to grasp the impact that Friedan’s work has had. I would be quite surprised to learn, for example, that either my mother or my grandmother had any familiarity with Betty Friedan, her book, or even her work with the National Organization for Women, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that both of them could describe quite readily the mystique that Friedan charts.  And at some level, I think that is my frustration with The Feminine Mystique that can only be overcome by seeing it in the context of a broader movement:  the book seems to speak to only one experience of being a women and that experience is upper middle class, fairly well educated, and white.  But as it was for me in Professor Valk’s class, the book – The Feminine Mystique – was only the beginning.

            I still do not have a sense of where one might locate the terminus ad quem of Friedan’s book - or Second Wave Feminism for that matter – but I would like to point out some possible cites of connection.  Over the past few weeks, I have been reading an odd assortment of texts (odd considering that my reading is typically bifurcated between Dora the Explorer or Dr. Seuss books and the writings of white men who died in the fifteenth century).  My English 1110 class permitted me the opportunity to return to Donna Haraway’s cyborg essay, and because of other pursuits I have also had the pleasure of reading J. Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism and part of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenologies and rereading large parts of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter.  Part of my interest lately has been fleshing-out some of Haraway’s provocations, but I have also been spurred to reconsider my own position vis-à-vis women’s rights, the LGBTQIA movement, and certain political questions that I have long held rather unquestionably.  More to the point, my reading of Gaga Feminism coincided with President Obama’s second inaugural address, and that coincidence has left me reeling to be quite honest.  

You might not begrudge me that I never quite made the connections between Betty Friedan and the Black Panther Movement or the Combahee River Collective. But what about those between Friedan and Stonewall?  Friedan and Judith Butler? Friedan and Donna Haraway?  Friedan and J. Jack Halberstam?  Friedan and current discourses about “the successful (American) woman” (see this “argument” for Ke$ha as today’s burgeoning feminist)?  Friedan and President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address?  I am searching not for a terminus for Friedan’s work – work which I think continually prompts us to be ever-vigilant even if we can imagine that we are better off, more equal, more open, or more possibilistic – I am searching for sights of connectivity.  I want to continue locating the places where this “problem that has no name” is reconfigured and prompts different (if difficult) responses.  And I think that is the way to end my own recollection of encountering Friedan’s work – to recall that what might be most challenging about re-reading Friedan or reading Friedan for the first time today is recognizing that when it was released fifty years ago, The Feminine Mystique was difficult, divisive, provocative, monumentally significant.